Narrator: In 2017, a young Pakistani man named Hamza bin Walayat faced a British Home Office tribunal that would decide his fate. He was seeking asylum, arguing that his life was in danger in his home country because he was a humanist—a belief outlawed as blasphemy and punishable by death. The assessors, however, were unconvinced. They quizzed him not on his ethical convictions but on his knowledge of Plato and Aristotle, ancient Greek philosophers. When his answers didn't align with their narrow, academic definition, they rejected his claim, declaring he was not a "true" humanist. This life-or-death bureaucratic misunderstanding poses a profound question: What exactly is humanism? Is it an ancient philosophy, a modern ethical stance, a political movement, or something else entirely? In her book, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope, Sarah Bakewell embarks on a sweeping journey to answer this question, tracing the vibrant, complex, and often perilous history of an idea that has shaped the modern world.

Narrator: The story of humanism, as Bakewell charts it, begins not as a formal philosophy but as a passionate, literary rescue mission. In the 14th and 15th centuries, Italian scholars like Petrarch and Boccaccio felt they were living in a "Dark Age," a period of forgetfulness that had severed their connection to the wisdom of ancient Greece and Rome. Their project was one of recovery. They became manuscript hunters, scouring the dusty libraries of remote monasteries for lost texts.

This endeavor is perfectly captured in the work of Poggio Bracciolini, a papal secretary and one of history's greatest book-finders. During a break from a church council in 1417, Poggio explored a German monastery. There, in a dark, neglected tower, he found a complete copy of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things, a radical poem that explained the world through atoms and dismissed fear of the gods and death. The text had been lost for centuries. For Poggio and his friends, this was more than an academic find; it was like freeing a prisoner from a dungeon. They saw their work as "raising ships" from the depths of a forgotten ocean, salvaging the intellectual treasures of the past to illuminate their present. This act of recovery—of reconnecting with classical ideas about virtue, eloquence, and the human potential for greatness—formed the bedrock of the humanist movement.

Narrator: As humanists recovered ancient texts, they also recovered ancient tools of critical inquiry. The movement soon evolved from simply preserving knowledge to actively questioning it. The 15th-century scholar Lorenzo Valla embodied this provocative new spirit. Valla was a master of philology, the historical study of language, and he used it as a weapon against unquestioned authority.

His most famous target was the "Donation of Constantine," a document the Catholic Church had used for centuries to assert its temporal power over Western Europe. The document claimed that the Roman Emperor Constantine had granted this authority to the Pope in the 4th century. Valla, working for the King of Naples (who was in a political dispute with the Pope), applied his scholarly lens to the text and found it to be a clumsy forgery. The Latin was filled with words and phrases that didn't exist in the 4th century, and it contained historical blunders. Valla's treatise debunking the Donation was an intellectual bombshell. It demonstrated that expertise and evidence-based reasoning could successfully challenge even the most powerful institutions. This shift from reverence to critical inquiry, amplified by the invention of the printing press which spread such daring ideas, marked a crucial evolution in humanism.

Narrator: While many humanists looked outward to classical ideals, the 16th-century French nobleman Michel de Montaigne pioneered a radical turn inward. Shaped by a unique education where he was forbidden to speak any language but Latin as a child, Montaigne developed a deeply skeptical and curious mind. After retiring from public life, he created a new literary form: the essay.

His Essays were not formal arguments but meandering explorations of his own thoughts, habits, and contradictions. He wrote about everything from the education of children to his own fear of pain and his struggles with kidney stones. In an age of religious fanaticism and civil war, Montaigne refused to claim certainty. Instead, he embraced his own changing nature, famously asking, "What do I know?" His work was a profound act of self-acceptance, arguing that the hardest and most noble task is simply to live one's own life well and naturally. By making his own "human stuff" the subject of his inquiry, Montaigne humanized humanism, shifting its focus from abstract ideals to the messy, beautiful, and complex reality of individual experience.

Narrator: The humanist focus on human experience was put to a severe test by the Enlightenment's confrontation with large-scale, inexplicable suffering. On All Saints' Day in 1755, a massive earthquake devastated the city of Lisbon, killing tens of thousands in a horrific combination of collapsing buildings, a tsunami, and raging fires. The disaster sent shockwaves across Europe, challenging the optimistic philosophy, associated with Leibniz, that this was the "best of all possible worlds."

The French writer Voltaire was appalled. He responded first with a poem and then with his satirical masterpiece, Candide. The novel follows its naive protagonist as he endures war, torture, and natural disaster, all while his tutor, Pangloss, insists that everything is for the best. After witnessing the horrors of the Lisbon earthquake, Candide finally rejects this blind optimism. The book concludes with a simple, profound piece of advice: "We must cultivate our garden." For Voltaire and many Enlightenment humanists, this was the answer. Instead of trying to justify suffering or find a divine plan, humans should focus their energy on practical, tangible action to improve their own small corner of the world. This philosophy, known as meliorism, is a cornerstone of modern humanism: a belief in progress driven not by divine will, but by human reason, compassion, and effort.

Narrator: For much of its history, the "human" in humanism was a limited concept, often implicitly referring to white, educated, European men. A crucial part of the humanist story is the long and ongoing struggle to expand that circle. Bakewell highlights the thinkers who fought to apply humanist principles of freedom, dignity, and education to all people.

Frederick Douglass, who was born into slavery in the United States, provides one of the most powerful narratives of this struggle. In his autobiography, he describes how learning to read was his first step toward liberation. His master's wife, Sophia Auld, began teaching him the alphabet, but her husband furiously stopped her, declaring that education would "spoil" an enslaved person. Douglass realized then that literacy was the pathway from slavery to freedom. He continued to learn in secret, and his discovery of a book of speeches, The Columbian Orator, ignited his desire for emancipation. Douglass’s journey from enslaved person to a leading abolitionist and intellectual demonstrates the transformative power of education and the humanist demand that the rights and potential of every individual be recognized, regardless of race, gender, or social standing.

Narrator: The 20th century presented the most profound challenge to humanist ideals. The rise of totalitarian ideologies like Fascism and Nazism represented a direct and violent assault on everything humanism stood for: individual dignity, reason, freedom, and universal fellowship. These anti-humanist movements sought to crush the individual in favor of the state, to replace critical inquiry with blind obedience, and to divide humanity into master and inferior races.

Yet, even in the face of such darkness, the humanist spirit of hope persisted. One of the most poignant examples is Ludwik Zamenhof, a Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist who grew up in a town torn apart by ethnic and linguistic hatred. As a response, he dedicated his life to creating a universal, neutral language—Esperanto, which means "one who hopes." He believed a shared language could be a bridge to understanding and peace. Zamenhof's family was later murdered in the Holocaust, a tragic testament to the very hatred he sought to overcome. But his creation, an act of profound optimism, survived. This story illustrates the core of humanism: not a naive belief that the world is perfect, but a resilient hope and a rational determination to make it better, even in the face of unimaginable tragedy.

Narrator: Ultimately, Sarah Bakewell's Humanly Possible reveals that humanism is not a single, static creed but a 700-year-long conversation. It is an evolving tradition of thought and action dedicated to the idea that humans are responsible for creating meaning and purpose in this life. Its central thread is the conviction that through reason, inquiry, empathy, and connection, we can improve both ourselves and the world around us.

The book leaves us with a powerful and timely challenge. As the 2022 Declaration of Modern Humanism states, humanists believe that morality is inherent to the human condition and that the solutions to the world's problems lie in human reason and action. In an age of polarization, misinformation, and existential threats, the question Bakewell's history implicitly asks is not just "What is humanism?" but "How will we practice it now?"